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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Daylights saving time was a
foreign concept, like ovens that weren’t for baking. (in Europe they
call the house heaters ovens.) This is something that becomes a part of your
life, it is the first stop when you get home, and it’s your love, your warmth, your family at least in the winter months. Once we had a brownout(KPLC
stalks me even here.) This was in winter and our ovens wouldn’t work, I went to
sleep and when I woke up it was cold, it
was uncomfortably cold, it was painfully cold, pinpricks on every spare
surfaced of skin, pain marks being left and felt. It was the first time that
cold kept me in bed and the first time I felt cold without recourse to action.
It was colder outside but at least outside you have clothes to wear, you have
wool and you have jackets, scarves and gloves and the knowledge that it should
be like that.

This is a picture of Kristiansand
on 26th of March. The time is self-evident. Yes this is now the time
the sun begins to go down. It’s not till 8 pm that the light begins to retreat
from the earth and with that spring is starting.

Daylight saving is actually a
quite artificial stealing of time from the atmosphere. It’s done ostensibly to
save electricity but it really doesn’t. All it does is make people happier. On
the 25th of March the whole country sets their clock one hour ahead.
This means that 7 o’clock last week looks just like 8 o’clock this week. And we
have been having some good weeks.

The sun comes out in all her
glory dressed in a dress, dressed to impress and pressed with a glow that’s
heavenly. I was in shorts and sandals on Saturday looking the full tourist down
to a backpack. We walked through town, a town that had belched all its inhabitants onto the main street, Markensgate. The beauty of
the main street is that it’s a pedestrian only street. No cars except police.
This is the street you walk in when you are drunk and drinking. Even in the
dead of winter there is no snow on this street. How? They heat it. They have
ovens under it which warm it up. How is this affordable or even practical? This
comes of a country that discovered oil decades before it discovered its 5th
millionth citizen.

There is money to go around in
Norway. Money and money. This is the richest country in the world, best
standards of living and the most expensive. You see oil and weapons are
exported out. Inside they have a government that actually works, one that makes
sure that the economy goes round and round. The welfare system works here, it
actually does. If you want an economic paradise get born a Norwegian citizen
and sit back. Unemployed people will get 6,000 kroner a month. This is 1,000
dollars. Now the country is so expensive that this guys is not exactly balling
but with some financial acumen this person could afford to go watch Jay z and
Kanye west perform(600 kroner for the May show.)

But it’s also a kind country;
they spread their wealth around through a program in the foreign ministry
called NORAD which is taxed with supporting development programmes. Kind of
like USAID if America had enough oil for all her hundreds of millions and no
aspirations to empire. Maybe people learn about empire and conquest from the
past. The Vikings came from Norway, they sought out foreign heads instead of shipping out foreign aid. On ships of wood and wills of steel they went forth into the
world spreading rape, misery and plunder. But as they all do that empire
crumbled and fell. People who play with empire rarely start that game again.
Rome, Greece, wherever Babylon is they slinked away. England and her short man
syndrome watched as the colonies shrank away, too far from her heart for blood
to get there. They died and all that’s left is the Falkland’s.

But daylight savings. I can begin
to understand the Vikings. I can begin to understand that the Norwegians of now
are still struck by wander lust, a need and the means to see the world, to live
a year here and spend 6 months there. The winter. The winter kills more than
just the plants. It kills life itself. It leaves everything a shadow. I can’t
pretend that I didn’t see it or that I wasn’t affected. Life was grey back
then. Nothing happened. I ate, I slept, I drank, I shat and then I shut myself
in. coming home at times I thought were too early but my body wouldn’t allow me
to move out. It was cold and dark. My fingers hurt all the time. My face was
used to the onslaught, well used to complaining about it. There was nay a
friendly face to say hey! And I wasn’t in love.

I fall in love with countries if
I do it right. Wherever I am I fall in love. It becomes home and my heart is
lent to the most beautiful place in the world. It took me a long time to fall
in love in Norway. But now I remember the moment I fell in love. It was 2 weeks
ago. I had gone to Oslo and was invited by one of the Ugandans to watch a
charity show. Earlier that night I had enjoyed heavenly cuts of meat and a
bottle of wine, stimulating conversation, pretty faces and my favourite book
library so far all in the same house. I stepped out of the event to have a
smoke, just one (am still at the point where I lie to myself that all I’ll ever
need is one a day.)

I stood there and watched the
human traffic and heard the sounds of the city. I don’t know why it happened
then but something just snapped. I liked her then I loved her. It was that
simple. That point when you can see yourself making a life in a country is the
only real joy of travelling. Then I came back to Kristiansand and walked around
in the dark. I met a girl who made my heart beat like I was a school boy again.
She works in a shoe store and asked me to go see her again.

I did and as we talked she had to
pretend to work, so she kept touching the shoes, so slightly. Turning them this
way and that, as she said, “I have to do some work.” But that action stuck with
me, her just slightly, ever so slightly turning the shoes this way and that, a
millimetre, a centimetre and then smiling. Then she told me she has a boyfriend. As one of my friends recently told me, story of my life.

Now the sun shines brighter for
longer. We stole an hour. We artificially made it later and we went late to
work on Monday. The fact of daylight savings a once in a lifetime excuse to
sleep in (about to become one of those bloggers who never give the address to
the boss.) they didn’t mind that we forgot, hours are lost to more experienced
people who just forget. It slips their minds completely that now the sun goes
down later.

So I get why they travel and why
the Vikings went all the way to the ends of the earth, wouldn’t you if life
fled your country all the time. It would be a moment to seek out warmer climes
and better signs. When the sun came back though it would be time to come back
because they didn’t lie when they said there is no place like home.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Last night I came in contact with
two acts of kindness, one 33 years old the other as fresh as fallen snow. While I
was out I met this Bangladeshi guy and we began talking. It’s not a fallacy
that foreigners are always drawn to each other, it’s not even a race thing, last year people who saw I wasn’t Egyptian opened up to me much faster, I was better able
to access some social groups, go to some parties, hear some conversations than
if I had been an Arab. Same thing here, our foreign identity, our stamp as
outsiders, our otherness makes sticking together much easier.

Anyway he tells me he wasn’t
really a foreigner; he’s been in Norway for 33 years. And here’s the clincher,
here’s the part that can only happen since am so far away from home, he then tells
me that he came over with mother Theresa. Yes. Mother Theresa. He was 2 and a
half years old then so it feel important he was just along for the ride. As she
picked up her Nobel Prize she left the seeds of a conversation I would have 30+
years later. He told me about this speech she had given to the nations of the
world. Gathered before her were presidents and pressmen, consuls and cabinet
ministers, dignitaries and everymen. She said.

“Know your people. Love your
people.”

Simple message and I am a fan of
simple messages. I am also a fan of Mother Theresa. I remember when she called on
people to give. To give not just what they could bear to live without but to
give until it hurt, give until they bled.

Mother theresa said, "I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbour, do you know your next door neighbour?"

She said, "even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own."

and, "if you can't feed a hundred people feed one."

Am walking home later that night
when I meet a friend of mine, baba Ali. He’s from Senegal. He has a head of
dreadlocked hair tied up tight in his snow hat. He talks perfect French and
imprecise English and can play the drums to the beat of the heart of a love-struck
boy. He’s going home and I walk with him. A few metres away we see a guy
sitting in the cold with his head in the crook of his elbow much like I was
when I walked through Oslo. He tells me this guy has been sitting here for the
last 3 hours, maybe he has nowhere to sleep.

“Let me wake him up” he shakes
him. “ Hey men, you can come sleep at my place, tomorrow you wake up you go
home.”

“Yer, yer. But don’t worry about
me I’m Swedish." he says this as if it explains him sitting there the whole
night, "we Swedish people we drink too much.”

“Yer man but its ok, just come
over.”

We begin to walk and he’s
understandably uneasy, kindness is a gift horse life teaches us to look in the
mouth as the words flow out. He obviously has nowhere to go but
tries to ditch us, muttering his mantra of over and over,

“I’m Swedish, I’m Swedish.” Like
it’s a cloak of invincibility. Finally he enters Ali’s house takes a couch and
falls asleep. I leave this house a little later and I run into the cops.

I love running into the cops in
Norway, I feel like it’s their job to take care of me, I will spend public
funds to get me directions to a place(taxpayer, yeah!) but these guys stop.

It’s a police van. The one who’s
going to do most of the talking is a young brash guy about to make his first
arrest for possession and use of marijuana. He can’t wait, he really can’t he
wants the textbook open in his lap, fresh out of cop school and already a star.
The driver is older, more experienced, he sits and makes conversation with me
all through, listens to my jokes but shows solidarity by not bursting out loud
at my undoubtable humour.

Arrester : hello, do you have id?

Me : of course I do

I take out my passport and give it to him. He handles it awkwardly like
the bouncers at clubs are wont to do and I know it’s going to be a long search.

Me : the visa is right there, no,
no you’re going the wrong way, and you see that’s my other visa you have to
keep scrolling to get to the relevant one.

Arrester : what are you doing in Norway?

Me: I’m here with the peace corps
am working at the archives.

Arrester : So do you have a work
permit?

Why hasn’t he given me passport back and why, oh why would I go
clubbing with my work permit?

Me : it’s at home, but if you
guys give me a ride there... it’s close Grimstad,

Arrester : have you ever had
contact with the police?

Me : well not till today 1, 2, 3,
policeman.

Arrester: have you done anything
illegal?

Does he mean tonight or in my whole life?

Me : I try not to.

Arrester : have you smoked hashish

Me : I would have to go to
Amsterdam for that.

Arrester : when were you in
Amsterdam?

Sarcasm needs a map here.

Me : in transit I was passing
through on my way here, I was just in the airport.

Arrester : you smoked in the
airport?

What does this guy think happens in Amsterdam, you get a bag of hash as
they check your belongings, a sit there and puff as we go through your things policy?

Me : in the airport? No.

Arrester : when was the last time you smoked, you just
talked about Amsterdam.

As long as we’re going to talk about things that are legal in other
countries… everyone I know drives on the left side of the road at home, is that
a subject of interrogation.

Me : I have never smoked.

Arrester : I’m trying to figure
out why your eyes are so red.

With incredulity!

Me : its late at night I’ve been
drinking, smoking cigarettes.

Arrester : what have you been
smoking.

I could tell him but instead I take out the remnants. A pack with two
cigarettes, one brown cigarillos from Denmark. He sniffs them suspiciously. As
he is otherwise occupied I talk to the driver.

Me : the brown ones are cigarillos
I got them in Denmark at 15 kroner a packet.

Driver : cheap huh?

Me : yeah it’s cheap.

Arrester : do you mind if I
search you?

Me : go ahead

I assume the figure two stance
ready for this.

Arrester : if I search you I
won’t find anything right?

Me : yes.

He searches me thoroughly I stand
there. The feeling of being untouchable by police is a great one.

Arrester : can I check your hat.

Me : my hat?

I take it off and plunge my head into the van because it’s cold. I have
a weather conversation with the other guy.

Me : after the daytime I thought
it would be warm but…

Driver : its Norway.

Arrester : ok.

he gets in and I realise I want something from them. Nothing as
mundane as an apology, but a service would be good.

Me : home is far away, si you
guys give me a ride there.

Driver : grim is not that far in
fact you can go this way and be there in no time at all.

Me : ok, but does any of you have
a light?

Arrester : no but I use snuz

How did we get to the point with this guy where he’s offering me drug
advice, intimate search that one.

Me : I haven’t tried it but I
have heard good things about it.

This I must say is the perfect way to get offered any type of drug
(snuz is tobacco that the Nordic peoples use, they insert a bag of tobacco in
their gums and suck on it. Some of them cut their gums so the snuz is delivered
faster and purer.) The driver keeps looking for his light.

Driver: sorry I don’t have any.

Me : well ok.

Cigarette lighter : I have a
light, here.

So I amble to the back of the van where this third policeman is carted
around in just to provide cigarette lights.

Me: have a good night.

And I puff away into the night. I hope his superiors ripped the recruit
a new asshole for wasting my time.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

By now you have all seen the Kony
2012 video but just in case and to give the blog some life, here is the link
below.

Now maybe someone did take the
time out to watch the 27 minutes right
now but if not that’s ok, its 27 minutes. In synopsis it’s about the warlord Joseph
Kony and an effort to stop him. There have been some critics of the video here and they make some very strong points for example "For all the excitement around awareness as an end in itself, one could be forgiven for forming the impression that there might be a "Stop Atrocity" button blanketed in dust in the basement of the White House, awaiting the moment when the tide of awareness reaches the Oval Office." ) about simplifying what is so
much more complex than 27 minutes can describe. But there’s no denying the good
points, there’s no denying that awareness is good and people learning more
about the world and what’s happening is the only way that they can find a way
to doing more about the world..

Anyway, how many have seen the Israel-Iran
video concerning the possible unleashing of the dogs of war. Previously on current affairs; Iran has been trying to get their
nuclear power program off the grid or on it, am not sure which. Israel is not
happy about this and they have their reasons. Israel after all is a battered
wife, there’s a lighter sentence for a
woman who kills her husband after years and years of psychological pressure,
this constant fear can make her fragile and in her fragility gift her strength that can lead to an escape. This is not a crime of passion since
usually the plan is very logical and thought out but it’s treated as such since
anyone can see that permanent stress can lead to breakage.

Israel is like that battered woman, it’s
hard to imagine another country whose history is so pockmarked with pain and discrimination
(we are a whole continent and it’s just been 400 years.) theirs stretches back
to the Egyptians and the Persians, the Babylonians
and the Romans, deportation, forms of ethnic cleansing and slavery jostle in
the dark of their history. Then in the
last century the holocaust.

So they overreact. Cultural
memory kicks in and they fight back answering a knife with a canon, 10 with1100. They are used to being hunted and they know they need to fight back. The
Iranian president once said he wants to
wipe Israel off the map of the world. It was clarified saying he meant it literally, and this was one of those occasions
where saying this still leads to ambiguity, does he want to kill all the
Israelis or just not have a country called Israel in the actual world map, the
latter he affirmed, but still.

So Israel have their reasons for
not wanting a nuclear Iran(when said like that it sounds like the whole country
was exposed to radiation and can now get everyone sick, I guess that’s how it’s
meant to sound.) America bows to Israelis will. 40% of the world’s billionaires
are Jews, the Google guys, the Facebook guy? All Jews. In economic strength
they find influence.In money so old its turning brown they find a say and so
America listens to them, when Israel says they don’t want a nuclear Iran you
hear a US president commit to military action if Iran arms itself with a bomb.
You hear the rhetoric turned up by the Israeli prime minister, you hear answers
from the Iranian leader and every day with every speech they get closer and
closer to yet another war in the Middle East then you watch this video.

That’s just 2 minutes, if you
have good net click on it, it’s definitely worth it. It’s a video that puts a
face on the people. There’s something universally human about the point when
the guy goes “I never even met an Iranian except a guy in a museum in France,
nice dude.” He goes on to talk about the fact that he doesn’t think that
Iranians are shaped by their foreign policy or even that foreign policy is
shaped by the Iranians. There are people who are not consulted because war is
not a democratic undertaking. People don’t vote to send off their children to
die in far off battlefields, away from home, away from love, doing things that
turn boys into monsters.

For too long all the interaction
that an Iranian got with an Israeli was restricted to politically minded and
economically funded rhetoric, speech that is not worth a pinch of salt in
relating what’s actually happening. Think about how many people think like their politicians,
agree with what they say. And which politician’s children actually serve in the
war. Finally we had an appeal from a father, a brother a son, to mothers and
daughters, to husbands and wives, the real victims of war and the appeal was
simple; we do not want to bomb you.

Of course there will be critics
of this video too but that’s not the point. Nothing’s perfect even something
that is so clearly pure (I believe a lot of the motives for the Kony video were
pure but purity can be the other side of
naivety.)

Last year we had the Middle East
revolutions(as my friend Lucas quipped once about the one still on-going "to all
the homies dying in their homes in Homs #Syria #its getting Syrias"-‘twas a
twitter thing-) and the role that social media, that instant communication
played in these revolutions is undeniable. While I was in Cairo I saw a book
about tweets from Tahrir. Someone had collected tweets over that period of the
January 25 revolution in Egypt and made them into a book. An eye witness account
in 140 characters or less of an event that changed our world, one stuck with me, a victory tweet “he’s gone now let’s get his fucking name off of
everything.”

War works by demonising the
enemy. Noone can rationalise killing people they know, they can’t think they
are actually fighting people like them, they would go crazy. But what about
what happened in your own country when neighbours turned on each other? Well
there was a lot of brainwashing and name calling, a lot of convincing, Kikuyus
called stains and Kalenjin called vermin. People had to see their neighbours as
something less than first. But now we have a tool that allows people to
actually talk, to talk across borders to send love and hugs and kisses from one
point to another.

And I don’t think that hugs, love
and kisses can stop bombs, bullets and bastards. I don’t think that any
outpouring of love on its own is enough to stem the tide of greed that gets
wars going. But it’s a start and something we never had before. Remember
weapons of mass destruction what would have happened if there was a way for an
Iraqi to say "don’t bomb us, we are just like you. we too are lovers and friends, brothers
and sisters, parents and children. Each of us encompasses a world of complexities and emotions that is
being reduced to a meaningless 3 letter acronym. Talk to your leaders" they
could have said, "protest." The war may have happened anyway but who knows what
the butterfly effect could have meant for the war efforts. Isn’t the life of
even one conscientious objector worth the 10,000 shares that get a video like
that to him?

I fell into the trap of thinking about foreign policy as representing the countries wants. I thought
of Iran as an entity and Israel as another I didn't think of the man up there
who just wants peace, who’s tired of war and is tired of the propaganda that
leads to it, who is so exhausted that he wants to do something and makes a simple
message.

And facebook for all its faults; its lack of human interaction, the anger you feel when one person takes out
their phone when talking to you instead of talking to you, for all
their faults social media may be one of the most powerful weapons we have. A
way to connect across the globe and across borders, a reason that we have all
now heard of Joseph Kony and a steering force to right the rudder of the ship
heading to oblivion.

It’s not perfect, it’s not all
right but when was there ever a drive to war and a message of peace was sent
out so simply. When last did a dove alight on a Muslim country from Israel,
when last were we reminded that there are people there and not just governments? When last did the ideas of
the people actually hold sway?

Humanity in all its excesses, the
vanity, the shallowness, the snide remarks and cat calls are on display for us
all to see, but humanity in all its innocence is there too. A graphic designer
thought he could make a difference, a filmmaking ngo thought they could raise
awareness and it looks like they can.

Immortal technique raps that
“universal truth is not measured in mass appeal.” and the video we all like and share the most will not be the truest. but the Kony 2012 got us talking, talking about what's good with it and what's right. Got us asking questions about the calling for US military intervention. Debates have been had and information has been sought by people who wouldn't have had they not watched the video and felt there was something more. Its been a while since I read the sentiment African solutions for African problems turn up in so many well articulated and thoughtfully written articles.

"That we are people is something we oft forget, without seeing them how can we hope to remember that they too are."

Monday, March 19, 2012

So let me attempt to explain the trust based system that is Norwegian public transport. You pay before you travel and in exchange for
your money you get a transport card. You can fill it in day to day (charge it
like a phone) hour to hour or month to month. In Oslo you need this if you will
be going around since though it is a small city it’s still pretty big to walk
from one end to the other. With a monthly card you can get on anything for the
whole month, a tram to Tidemands, a bus to Bygdøy, a train to Tøyen,
a subway to Sinsen. You just walk in and walk
out. If you want you can swipe it through the barcode machines and see if they
turn green but you don’t have to.

They have random checks every other day or so but basically
it’s a trust system, what’s to stop you risking the law? The slim possibility
of a 900 kroner fine? Yeah that stops you in your tracks. I was in Oslo over
the weekend and I got a card at one of the convenience stores, a Narvessen. It
was just a piece of paper with a bar code printed on its back that would be
valid for an hour. I had no idea how to use it, whether the hour started
running from the time of purchase or the time of validation, so I asked this
guy at the stop how to use it.

“There’s a little red machine at the entrance to the bus and
you just put it in and it gets stamped and that’s it but,” leaning in
conspiratorially, “I’ve been travelling for free for 3 months.”

I was hungry for this information and my frank stare told
him this.

“You see with a card like the one you have it only starts
counting down from the point at which it’s put in the machine and you don’t
have to put it in the machine. I bought one in January and I just walk around
with it in my pocket, if I see the inspectors I’ll put it in but until then.
Another thing you may do is get some wax on your card, because it’s a stamping
machine that begins the countdown, all you have to do is when the card is
stamped take something and scratch off the wax then you are good to go, that’s
an old school trick.”

With genuine appreciation “it’s nice to meet a Norwegian who
breaks the rules”

“Well am Swedish so that may be it.”

Oslo, Oslo, Oslo. Looks so nice had to write it thrice. You
see I have learned this one unassailable fact about myself. I am a city boy
through and through. I need the thrive of the city, the beating of a million
plus hearts to the stress of work, hurry, pollution, indifference and
unhappiness. I need to share my air with a lot of other people who think they
don’t want to share theirs with mine. I need the noise of a city, the constant
bubble, bubble, bubble of the sound that cannot escape. The barely there
smiles, the just scratch the surface to find it anger, the feeling of
togetherness that comes from being human in a place that was fashioned out of
thin air and made into a reflection of the soul. I love cities and so I love Oslo.

Later that night I was talking to this group of guys about
Kenya and the differences between there and here. Its poor, we mistrust our
government. That very simply sums up all the political and economic differences
between the two countries. One of the guys had this theory that all could be
traced back to the drawing of borderlines. I’ve read about this, an article about a book(i read many more articles about books than actual books) that said one of the greatest fallacies about the
scramble for Africa was this lie that it was a partition of the continent into
different nations and border lines when the truth is it was one of the greatest
unifications of groups of people. Kenya has 42 tribes; Germany has the Germans,
Nigeria 250 Poland the polish. This repeats itself over and over. Nation states
here have a history of being a nation, a shared culture and language, a history
that stretches back over bloodshed, partitions, conquests, colonisations and independences
for hundreds and hundreds of years before Norway had the Norwegians and Sweden
the Swedes.

42 tribes means 42 potential nation states, lumping them
together without thought to shared rivalries and broken kinships, having hundred year relationships
torn apart by a line in a map leaves a bitter taste, it sows the seeds of war
and civil strife. It means that people who are foreigners to each other have to
call themselves Kenyan and it means that the only thing we have in common in
that country was a colonisation, a shared history of defeat. I agree with a lot
of this since to makes sense but I also think we are to blame for many of our
problems. This guy traced it back to the borderlines and like he had made it up
the mountain stopped and stared. He thought corruption and the stagnated
economic growth could be explained by this, he thought political instability
and all the ethnic strife, the wars in and with Somalia could have been
prevented if consultation on the process of border alignment had been done.

He blamed himself and all European for this (well the
ancestors) never mind that Norway doesn’t have one African colony. I disagree
with this assessment. I don’t like the lumping of the west together as a
homogenous entity that only worked to rape and plunder Africa, it was some
people. And I don’t like, especially I don’t like Africans being absolved of
their sins in a wash of white guilt. He had given a lot of thought to this but
he had not gone far enough. When the reins were handed back to us we fucked up.
We really fucked up.

Jomo Kenyatta. There’s a guy we can all argue about, the father
of our nation and it is possible that without him we could not have had unity, that we needed him released in order that Kenya could stand as one nation. But
what he did. All through school you are fed stories about this hero of the liberation;
our politicians have even had the gall to put back his face on the national
currency. Seriously. There’s a vast brain washing machine in Kenya that might
have to do with not talking ill of the dead and that general Kenyan tendency to
forget slights and forgive injuries. Jomo Kenyatta stole and stole; he stole so
much land and resources his family is worth billions, in American dollars.
There’s a story of him falling asleep and waking up and saying that all the
land between where we were when I fell asleep and now that I have woken up is mine (they were in a car at the time.) he ran cabinet meetings in kikuyu,
he whipped grown men and we are scared of saying these things to our children. They grow up thinking he was a great man and
why?

There is no real reason for it to be like this, none at all. Except history is
written by the victors, people vindicated by their strength, cunning and wealth
and so the history of the Kenyatta family is clean as a whistle. Behind every
great fortune there is a great crime and we all know of the crime but we don’t
speak of it. We don’t have condemnations of him except when you get old enough to find out for yourself. The Jomo Kenyatta myth is the Kenyan version of Santa Claus.

There’s a Norwegian girl I’ve known since 2008, she lived in
Kenya for a while. I saw her for the first time here yesterday and it was
strange. It was weird to be in her country now and it made me homesick as we
talked about things shared from our vast history together, names not mentioned
for so long, acts unburied and crushes half forgotten. She wants to go back and
settle down in Kenya, she’s learning Swahili and has a Tanzanian teacher here.
The most common admonition when she talks the way she is used to?

“That’s not Swahili, that’s Kenyan.”

At the end of the night I found myself alone, you see while
we are in Oslo we live with some friends of ours, Ugandans and Mozabiquans
here on the same programme. When we go out they lend us a key. They live in
these apartments and the key is programmed to gain you admission to the front
door, to the floor of your room and to your room. No key nothing, out in the
cold. I was struck by a sudden bout of chivalry (the kind always brought on by
a pretty face shielding an interesting personality) and I offered to get her to
her bus stop. I gave the other Kenyans the key thinking I would call them as soon
as I got to Anker hostel and all would be good, 3:17 am.

Walking around town and I stop at a bus stop. There’s this
guy accosting these four girls there. As I stand he passes me and whispers
something to me in Norwegian. One of the girls gets really angry and asks me
what he said, “No idea I can’t speak Norwegian.”

And in the spirit of inclusion that all true perverts have he
begins speaking in English,

“Tell her I have a big dick”

“Good for you" she says, for him not me.

“Do you have a big...” points at the crotch area

Now she’s really pissed and I want to interrupt and push him
on his way but I know there’s something liberating about fighting a battle on
your own and Norwegian girls can hold their own. He leaves soon and I apologise
for the excesses of my gender.

“I can speak for myself.” I kind of seemed to
understand that my quizzical look says.

Then we start talking and I can’t say how the conversation
went here but it did. Norway is a country of subtleties and the rolling of the
tongue turns a word more than just in the air, it shifts it meaning making it
something else. Hurrah- prostitute hyurrah-hooray. They explain to me. And I
sit there remembering how in my first week I went to this dinner and the
national song was being sung. The chorus is “hyurrah, hyurrah!” we were singing
it at the end of the women’s speech which is this speech where a guy says
something about women and then everyone is happy and cheers. I gave voice to
this speech,

“Hurrah, hurrah.”

I sit down and this girl immediately asks, “You do know you
were just calling all the girls prostitutes right?”

The bus comes and the girls leave. 4:23 am.

I walk around and I get lost and ask these guys the way to
the hostel.

“You are going in the completely wrong direction, it’s like
1 kilometre that way, and you should take a taxi, in Norway? No way.”

At this point in the night the city is almost completely deserted
(clubs close at 3) silence rolls around the city like a ball of hay. It sweeps
the streets and makes the buildings glow. It’s otherworldly to see a city like
this stripped of its bare essentials, left a husk of buildings and naught else.
There’s a huge space in the centre of the city, a space just for the sake of
being a space. A structural oddity that all cities should have but very rarely
do. It takes my breath away I stand there and just look at it as blue light
falls onto it caressing the air and changing the earth oh so slightly. 4:49 am

I get to the hostel and try to call and then I realise I
have no credit. The cold hits me and takes my breath away completely. You see
there’s no kopa credo or similar service I am fucked. I go and sit down outside
in these chairs and contemplate the extent of my fuckery. This happens once inevery country; a wait in the cold is given me. I will sit outside and
contemplate my mistakes look at what brought me where I am and ask myself why I
allowed it. It happens once in every country.

When you are really tired all you have to do is focus on a
light somewhere, anywhere. You just look at the light and it wipes away your
memory of all the horror stories about people waking up dead from over exposure
in the winter, it blocks out the unfeeling hardness of the cold weather, it
leaves you drowsy and you begin to fall asleep, then you close your eyes and
welcome to the jungle. Am woken up by this passing girl, she looks at me sitted
there and snickers to herself. I rouse and then drowse again and sleep. Another
passing girl. Surely now it must be 6 am or something, its 5:07 this was when
I gave up.*

Luckily someone takes the time when I ask them to point me
to where there’s an all-night convenience store. I go in there and get some
credit, I call my Kenyan housemate and get into my room, the thing about this
is, there are two beds in the room, with three people, now me making it four, coming late messes up all the sleeping arrangements.
When I get home at such ungodly hours I can’t shake people awake to give me a
mattress or the hard surface of the beds, so I curl up to fall asleep.

It’s hard to sleep on a floor. You have no sheet so you
sleep in your jacket. Then you need a pillow and it’s impossible to properly
place your arms. They hurt wherever you put them incidentally the best place is
to lay your head on your bicep but I know this will hurt something wicked when
I get up the next day so I curl up and somehow I sleep.

And so I slept outside in the 2 degree weather and inside on
the stone floor. Hard, unyielding surfaces, unfeeling and indifferent, cold and
distant. Surfaces fading into oblivion like all cities do to us and even at the
end of this I still know that I love cities.

*only time i actually looked at my watch the rest are approximations from my hazy viewing of city clocks and backward timing

Friday, March 16, 2012

So I am on my knees scrubbing hard at the bathroom floor. There
are globules of chocolate dotting its concrete surface, stuck here and there comets thrown with great energy and anger. My head aches and hurts, my eyes ring with dizziness and I feel slightly tired, sick in fact.

A few hours previously my housemate came to ask me for
something or maybe they didn’t that’s how bad I was feeling, that am not sure
if my drunken sleep was interrupted or am just using that as a story device to
describe the extent of my malaise. During this fact or fiction wake up I
shrugged him away groggy, glum and unresponsive.

My day has been dotted with walks to the toilet for a piss,
something that thankfully took me past the bathroom where there was a pizza cooked
(store bought and oven warmed, the best kind) and pork dumplings that I
lovingly pigged into my mouth as I nursed yet another European hangover.

In Europe I will get hangover. It doesn’t matter what I do,
a headache follows a night out, Friday I didn’t drink a thing and woke up
Saturday with the left part of my head aching and throbbing, maybe my head just
misses its soil.

The night before had been one of those that you don’t write
home about. Too much to drink, too fast and two fingers become four and
suddenly there’s chocolate all over the bathroom floor. But it was also one of
those nights where the chocolate wasn’t the most interesting story.

We had left the house early to go get in cheap at the club,
come back home, get drunk and go back. We come home and there’s a scene on the road in
front of us, there’s someone crying, sobbing and wailing. She’s surrounded by
some people and we go close to find out what’s going on, see if our help will
be needed. Standing in the middle of the road is a girl whose body has been
wrapped around by her comforter, she’s not too drunk and there’s other people
around, a situation that looks to be in control.

We passed the entrance to our house so we walk on
nonchalantly since we don’t want to look too nosy. We find a party going on but
lose the nerve to crash it, plus we sort of stand out, being a crasher is about
blending in until you’re all having such a good time people think it’s your party. So we leave and go back
home.

As we pass there’s a couple exchanging words against a
fence due to the dark am not sure if its the same one as before. The guy gets angry and he pushes the girl against the fence really hard.
Their friends are around and so an escalation seems unlikely. I seem to be
proven right when hard shoves are traded in for harsh whispers. The tone of
them fills the night air now, tearing pieces out of the peace of the dark and leaving
a hiss of menace everywhere. This is not the sound of peace and atonement; this
is the sound of anger given in a just-you-dare kind of voice. But their friends
seem to think it will blow over and I am the only one giving any attention to
this powder keg.

Then the situation is defused and the guy is walking away
from his anger and her mistress. The tension hasn’t left the air yet, this
would be the point to turn but something n the atmosphere holds my gaze, I
haven’t worn my glasses this night so it’s nothing scenic nothing just a feeling, a whisper that is not all over.

The girl rushes her boyfriend and pushes him simultaneously tripping;
he lurches forward and curls to the road in a heap. And quick as a flash her heels are being
planted over and over in his stomach. He is being pummelled and everyone is in
shock about what’s happening, he tries to get up and finally he manages but
he’s learned from last time’s mistakes…

…so he picks her up and twists his body to the left in one fell
motion, he lets go of her and she hits the ground hard.

Is it ever justified to hit a girl? Are there instances in
life where we can forgive temper taking over the person who was tempted. I think
this is a more difficult and varied question than we commonly give credit to. It’s
wrong to hit women yes, but it’s also wrong to steal but we almost understand if
you are doing it to feed your children. So if we took the argument to its
absurd roots, what if there’s a female thief literally stealing from the mouths
of your babes do you still hold on to those ideals? What if you are pushed so
far that you have no idea that it’s happening.

What if while you are drunk she throws you on the floor and
you curl up like a foetus and she keeps kicking you with her heels, kicking and
kicking and kicking and kicking, what then?

It’s wrong to hit a woman but it’s not always the one who
does wrong who stands alone in the wrong. I'm trying to write this in a way that doesn't paint me as a wife beater sympathiser, i'm trying to find a way to say that its possible that anger can overcome logic and beat ideals down to a stump, parents get so angry they hit their children, that most defenceless of beings and this is wrong too but provocation behind the shield of a greater wrong is not right either.

But a shove is not a full body throw and this guy had taken it too far. As soon as the girl was down on
the floor her friend came to defend her, another girl who came and pushed him.
He did not pay mind to arguments about proportionality, about the immorality of
his act, he grabbed her too and threw her on the ground, a thud reverberating
to where I was.

I am frozen in place by the sheer speed of these acts, by my
mind still trying to process the girl tripping him, by my surety that their
friends wouldn’t even let it get this far. By my distance from the scene, its hazy and dreamlike, its emotionally disconnected i have never seen a fight like this and i can't wrap my head around it or yet move my feet toward it. Hiding behind the banner that reads "their friends will take care of them right?"

Before all this properly flashes through my mind the second girl’s
boyfriend has ran to pummel the first man. He’s angry and it comes off in waves
and waves. This is the window to carnage, the opening salvo in a war that would
roll along continents and years if allowed. But there’s a silent still
third party. One of the friends who springs into action and hold hands
pinned behind neck and does it in the textbook manner, so quietly and quickly,
silently and suddenly that the fight stops. And all we have are the sounds of a
struggling child.

And so two minutes after I stopped to stare the drama has
unfolded and found itself laid out on a table for me to dissect. A girl is crossing
the street opposite with her boyfriend who needs to pee, so she waits for him.
I begin talking to her,

“So that’s the end of the party?”

“Yer it’s like this every weekend, we drink, we fight , the
cops come and we start again.”

A few days later at work my colleague told us that a lot of
muggings happen in Easter when people are travelling, “but the police know the
criminals so they just round them up and lock them for those four days.”

Monday, March 12, 2012

I recently watched the kite
runner, I had read the book a few years ago and then I read it again fewer
years ago. It’s a sad story, a story of pain and love, a story of betrayal,
mistrust and carelessness and perhaps most painfully it’s a story of
redemption. It’s strange but when I hate somebody and then come around to
understand them and seek ways of forgiving them because they can’t seem to find
a way of forgiving themselves at that point in a movie or a book when I see someone try to
make it right and unabashedly try, try when there’s no other way out. Try when all
the actions are ultimately symbols of hollowness of the emptiness within it touches me.

The movie had subtitles in
Norwegian which was ok except when they spoke in Dari which is the Afghanistan
native language. At those points I would read the Norwegian subtitles and try to
pick up what I had learned in class. The simple pronouns, simple acts that i already knew. You, me,
marriage, work tomorrow. Language class is an endless exercise in humility,
sitting back and parroting what the teacher says and then getting nuts even
when you know you did wrong, veldig bra she says to every half reached attempt at Norwegian.(favourite thing thus far about
Norge is that I can say bra whenever I want, its good literally.)But when I sat
there and read the Norwegian subtitles and could make out what they were saying it i did feel bra.

Anyway it was nice to watch the
movie without the intrusion of a screenwriter’s vision (even though David
Benioff is the shit wrote Troy and is one of the guys at work on Game of Thrones.) still not being able to follow exactly what was happening in the
movie and have to fill in the blank spaces with pages of white , black code and memory, a
script from the recesses of my mind made the experience more touching. I was watching the
book come to life. I wasn’t always sure what was happening on screen but there were times,
certain scenes that corresponded to the book so much I knew exactly what was happening. I would see Amir write a story and hear it in my mind. I could see
scenes coming up and fill in the internal dialogue that books can give us, see
his reasons for doing what he did. Know that in time he would be redeemed but still
be angry at him, oh so angry.

Sometimes I think I really liked
this book because it was the first father and son book I ever read. The first
exploration of what that relationship means and contains that i had ever read. The relationship of the
characters in the book was not universal, it was anything but it carried
within it aspects that I recognised, things my friends who read the book agreed
they felt with their fathers, to their fathers. The constant burden that
sometimes the son places on himself to try to be superhuman, the misdrawn
disapproval that comes of living in two generations that communicate love and
acceptance in such different ways that we can go through life thinking we never
felt it. It was a book set in a time of change and we all always live in a time
of change and so it felt right.

And it showed me one major
difference between men and women MAJOR
SPOILER ALERT IN THIS PARAGRAPH Amir’s father sleeps with his servant’s
wife, a beautiful woman. A woman of the kind that breaks men and leaves them by
the wayside not giving them a second glance. She gives birth to Hassan, the poor object of so much betrayal and latent hate we can’t help but
saint him. The woman's husband is sterile so we know that this could not be his child. Most
men will agree that the adultery happened because of beauty and lust, while
women will attach honour and friendship to it. They say it was because he
didn’t want his servant not to have an heir, because of the pain that he saw
not having a son caused his friend that Baba slept with his friend's wife. I can see why, he’s saintly and good, almost
takes a bullet for a stranger and has a halo surrounding him most of the time. But guys can see that even in there
lies a capacity for betrayal, for weakness, for lust and to fall. I saw that
betrayal mirrored in the relationship between his sons which was why it came as
such as a shock. Admittedly this is very limited research and it may not hold true applying to only the women i have asked about it. And the scene in the end nearly broke my heart all over. after all the eyepopping, suicide inducing parts of the afghanistan-pakistan trip when there is nothing holding Amir to his nephew except a betrayal that seems to stretch back three generations and a carelessness that's appaling, in that scene when like the beginning there are kites being flown and cut. when the last kite of the book is cut and amir turns to look at his nephew before he runs for it and says for you a thousand times over just like his brother would say to him, the hope in that sentence, the memory in that scene, the pain in that hope always gets to me.

Away from the kite runner, I
began reading this blog recommended by a friend. It’s sad, beautiful and wistful, it’s a woman looking out of the window as it rains biting her lips
and thinking about life because in each raindrop she sees love but all the drops fall to the ground and splatter.

I couldn’t stop reading it and it
struck me how weird it is to read a blog, everything gets upended, most of us
don’t read a blog from the first day its put up, we come to it later by way of
reference, curiosity or almighty Google. When it’s a chronicle of a life we
catch the life halfway and never really see it full. We watch the movie from
the last scene as it were.

You begin with the most recent entry
and go back, you read about December then November then September. There’s
a backward chronology to the act that becomes suspenseful in a way. Sometimes
there’s a lot of self-reference in a blog, when someone says for example “the person from
that time” and you’re new. The first time you’re hearing about this character
is when they are being assumed known and then you wonder about them. There’s so
much mystery that surrounds it so many gaping holes as you keep peeling the
onion from the inside out.

You go lower and you see the
person change. You see their lives rewind you see them hope for something that
you know will not come to pass; you can read in their words from earlier a fear
of an event and know that it’s going to happen or that it will blow over. Its the
ultimate testament to its not as bad as you think. And you see them grow young
again. You see them say goodbye to somebody before you read about the hello.
The ugly ending is put before the beautiful beginning and in between there’s
the evolution, the backwards evolution a slow march to where it all started.

Then maybe you come to gaping
holes that you will never fill out. You find deleted posts and their shadows
waiting for you, just waiting to mock your suspense. You find links that are not
open anymore, the internet hiding something from you that your frustration and
proficiency with Google will not reveal. And ever backward you rush, sands back
into the top of the hourglass and then maybe you come to the first post, the
first foray into the whole thing. The purity that was before stats and comments
and an audience or lack thereof.

There’s that old scientific maxim
about the very act of observing something being enough to change it. I want to
know if being read changed her as much as it changed me. If the obsession with
page views and comments, the need to get the people who read you last time
changed her writing. I want to know if I can read the point in the blog where
she spent more time looking at stats than she did writing new posts. But I also
want to hope that this never happened to her. I want to hope that it stayed just
self-expression that the pressures of having an audience had no visible effect
on her writing. I hope for this but I would be envious at the same time.

I get over my insecurities by
telling myself I don’t own them all alone that everyone is like me. That though
we all like the sound of our own voice we are not as enamoured of it when its
recorded and played back. I don’t want to think that I was the only one who
looked at his stats and where they came from and even went as far as to wonder
why more people with opera access the blog than people with Mozilla. I don’t
want to be the only one who looks at the countries that it was accessed from and
treat it as more than just a passing curiosity. I don’t want to be the only one
who gets tired of engaging just myself in these tirades and seeks ways of
engaging others of promoting dialogue by direct addressing. I
don’t want to be the only one who isn’t sure his writing hasn’t stagnated and
maybe even fallen backwards, who feels he isn’t as funny or good as he wants to
be and even worse as he once was.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

With as presumptuous a title as that there are many places
this could go. It could plumb the depths of my spiritual, intellectual and
moral growth. It could talk about the effects that long, lonely walks have had
on me, let you know about the quiet whirring of my subconscious mind, the part
that doesn’t have to tell me what I think but just lets me know that I have
decided. It could be about how all you have to think about are the big things
in life; love, happiness, family and that from these trains of thought
carriages about politics and understandings of the human nature develop.

Well, one of my favourite biblical passages, (right now I
think it’s the most important but that changes from day to month to year to me
almost not remembering it at all) right now is that passage in exodus
where Moses encounters a burning bush and starts to hear things(would anyone be offended if i mentioned that though its quite clear it not this episode could be misinterpreted as a metaphor for marijuana?.) the true metaphor, the
more important metaphor comes later. Moses takes off his sandals in the
presence of God and asks him a simple question. the simplest and most complex of questions

He
asks, “Who are you?” God gives him the most beautifully complete answer you can
imagine.

“I am who I am.”

And in those 5 words religion gifts us happiness. It gives
us peace, joy and supreme knowledge. Those 5 words are all you need to keep
your compass steady, to find your true north. That’s it. Just accept who you
are.

“I am who I am.”

Yeah this post could go off on this serious note and explore
the deep thinkological (I made up this word because philosophical implies
something abstract usually and am not philosophising, just thinking) nature of
those 5 words. But…

As I found out after years of wondering why Kenyan girls
thought it was ok to share with me that they had fungi on their heads... growth
also just mean that your hair has grown.

So, my hair has grown. It’s been a while since I let my hair
grow. A month in I’ll cut off my hair I’ll keep it short and neat. Because I
can’t do one without the other. Here’s the thing about my hair, it’s hard, its
rock hard, its steel wool hard and after a while running a comb through it
becomes just too difficult an attempt for the shoddy prize of good grooming. But
I like to look good (who doesn’t and it’s not vanity I am who I am) so I just
cut it off and keep it short.

It’s not bad looking hair understand. It’s dark and strong. It’s
lustrous in the way that men’s hair can be lustrous. At 55 my father still has
a full head of hair, he looks young and completely youthful the mane of a thirty
year old, well one who does not have a bald spot. His mother has her hair at 70 something am not sure what age exactly because she predated mandatory birth certificates.
It’s long and hard, it has a streak of white running through it but its the streaks that denote steel more than age.
This is not an invitation for all the girls who want children with nice hair to
go off looking for my brothers (not enough Norwegian hits on this blog to make
this an advertisement for myself yet.) it’s just my way of saying I like my
head of hair.

I like the way it comes forward and gives me the opposite of
a bald spot, almost a threehead if I let it get away without being trimmed. But
since I can’t keep it neat and I like to look good I shave it off.

Enter this black man in Norway, moi. You know what's really different, our hair. Ours curls, theirs is straight, it grows like a cloud, that one falls like water. so no one will know that my hair is supposed to look neat
ergo I’ll still look good even with shaggy hair though the evidence of recent
dry spell may prove this point moot(ok it’s just a little bit of an ad.)

So i let it grow, I have growth. 2 months’ worth on my head
now. I wake up I don’t comb it I just go off to the office and sit there and
work like this is how it’s supposed to look(this is not something you can get
away with in Kenya.) and then I start to play with it.'

This is the real reason why my hair is so shaggy. You see am
a run my hand through my hair kind of guy. I don’t know why I picked up this
habit but I like it. It makes me look thoughtful, sometimes sad and sometimes vulnerable
(or so I think but with evidence of recent dry spell…) this is ok when the hair
is short, I’ll do this and get back to work. however hair grow longer at first I
like how it feels, its soft and seems to match the grooves of my palms, my
fingers feel happy there.

Then I start to play with it. I twist it and curl it in an
unending game of bend your will to me. I run my hands through it again and
again, I find the little standalone trees and tweak them. I watch the hair fall
in floods of deforestation onto my books and computer, littering the whole
world with my DNA. And always I twist it.

I twist it and twirl like there’s someone in the vicinity I
like, I make tiny little dreadlocks, micro dreads my little fears I call them. I
straighten them out and remake them then I forget to straighten them out and
they just sit there all curled up together the strands woven like a loom and
when I have to get a comb through them they wail with the sound of sweet
freedom. This is all I do all day, all waking night. I sit with my hands in my
head. my fingers in my hair making snares.

Then my biceps begin to ache. They ache and ache with the
pain of always being at that stressed position they have to be in in order to
parley with my hair. They scream out in frustration and I heed their call and I
take my hands away from my hair. But am addicted so my hands find their way
back. And this process goes on and on and on. Scream relief, release and
scream.

I can’t stop myself this i now know. And now there’s the pain that
comes when I have to comb it and even worse the pain in my biceps that will not
go away. As the hair gets longer the strands are more available for tighter
weaving and now it hurts to take them apart but I feel like I like this pain or
find it necessary or just can’t stop and so there I am tearing the weave apart
bringing doom to the loom and my biceps ache, my muscles quake.

There is only one release. I have to shave the hair off. It
is in these moments that I remember why I shave my hair off. I don’t like this
pain, it’s too much and I can’t stop myself, I try and I can’t I really can’t
and I hate it. Shaving is my saviour. I always think it will be different, I
think I will change myself next time and stop this touching, twisting and
running but it never is and the reason I think it will be different is because
I forget those eternal words. The immutable, immortal proclamation that I
should make every day…

Monday, March 5, 2012

Long journeys have a way of coming to an end he thought as
he waited for Viola’s plane to land. Years have a way of falling through the
hands like sand until all that’s left is the last grain, a pebble that represents
the immensity of all that came before but one pebble, something small that can be
considered and comprehended.

He had pasted a smile on his face in preparation, your lover
leaves for all that time and you are not sure. It doesn’t matter what you tell
yourself, it doesn’t matter what you believe about human decency and the
strength of your bond all that matters is that the flesh is weak and faith follows its vessel. Even all the
preparations for weakness, all that proper pragmatism doesn’t keep you from
being wounded and scars may scab but that says nothing for the pain they harbour.

Your lover leaves and the truth is your body becomes weak
too. Your flesh yearns and there were many times when lust was the last memory
before regret. And regret he did. He couldn’t help it. But he wasn’t sure if he
regretted the mistake or the fact that he couldn’t lord his purity over her
anymore. He would know inside he wasn’t better than her and this hurt, not as
much as betrayal would but there was no
betrayal yet just his thoughts and his betrayals. But a man has to eat he told
himself, then why did his stomach ache so much? he should have wondered but this
was not the time for sad thoughts. The first surge of passengers was coming
through and paste his smile back he did.

Viola was tired. She had flown across seas and oceans; she
had been gone for so long that she knew nothing would look the same again. She
had that feeling familiar to all long gone people coming back home. A tinge of
excitement ran down her but even surer
was the feeling that she had changed too much or perhaps home had. There was a
fear it would be like watching a movie you liked as a child and being
completely unable to relate to yourself. It was unsettling and in the pit of
her stomach she was more scared than happy. This was why she sat and let the
rest leave the plane first. This was why she took her bags ever so slowly as
she prepared to go back into the world she had left behind. A longer
preservation of the memory she held dear was needed.

Besides she wasn’t ready to face him.

Promises are kept or they are broken and that’s the way of
the world. She had kept hers as best as she could but she still felt like she hadn't. Physical betrayal hurts, but it doesn’t hurt the worst. And they had
their understanding, implicit as only a mental wink can be. Silent and never to
be talked about. there was also the promise regarding coming back, starting a life when she
was finished. It was a promise to hold things in stasis. A promise that she wouldn't change and that he wouldn’t either, a promise that when she got back
they could pick it up from where it was no questions asked, no time passed, no
bonds broken, no barriers unbreachable.

She sighed.

And looked around at the bubble of the airport again. The
whirring of the luggage conveyors as they went round and round and round. Her
thoughts swirled too. She was supposed to be happy, she supposed she was but
even more she was scared.

She gripped her suitcase firmly and began walking.

The pasty smile had turned doughy now and like putty fallen
away from his face. There was no frown on, not yet. He appreciated the time to
think and think he did. Yes they had
an agreement, unspoken but no less acquiesced to however his indiscretions were in a radius that he would walk into. Their
presence in the air he breathed made it heavy, he hated that he felt guilty and
he was jealous of his friends who wouldn’t and he felt jealous of her who had
left behind what if any she had done far far away. If anyone would be caught it
would be him and then she could magnanimously forgive him. A chance he wouldn’t
have and then he would feel even smaller. The agreement was of silence after
all, discretion was necessary for silence and he had not been discreet, not all
the time.

Time passed.

And then he saw her
come through the doors, her bags weighed down by memories and thoughts and he
left all his behind. In the end his guilt was not formed out of thin air, it
was not based on empty emotion, he loved this woman and all he wanted to do was
to hoist her in his arms and forget all that had happened.

She looked up and saw a look of pure joy. And she responded
the way we all respond. Since childhood we are taught to treat love with love,
love God because he first loved us, love our parents because they took care of
us, showered us with emotion, love ourselves because… well that may be the only
true love. But seeing such naked joy, such bright love on his face she
responded in kind.

All her worries were washed away in a second, inside that smile and in that heart there is
a way. I will it to be.

And for just a moment it was. They hugged and in that hug
there was the best of everything they had left behind. The unspoken promises
and the unsaid understandings, the silence of not having to speak in order to
be heard. Peace and warmth. Love and peace.

“How was your trip?” And just like that it was over. Words have a way of
intruding where they are not wanted, of finding their way into places where all
they can do is break things apart. The real reason for war is words, without
them understanding would be possible but with them…

“It was fine” Weariness had crept into her voice, a silent
sigh. A need to speak about something more important, amnesia about the need
for small talk to bridge that gap.

“Am happy to hear that, you look really tired though it must
have been so long.” In his there was a wound, a touch of pain that the sight of
him couldn’t wake her up as it woke up Barb… he shook his head out of that, thinking
about her right now would be a betrayal.

“Yes it was a long trip but am happy to be back, just
tired.” The stars had stopped peeking through the sky she noticed. The clouds
were gathering already and it would rain as it always did here.

“It looks like rain clouds.” She added. Fatality creeping in
and making her more tired. Had she expected the very weather of home to change,
had she thought just because she felt different even the sky would change.

“Either that or its their bastard son.” He knee jerked like
he always had with her. A joke that had long ago sacrificed humour on the feet
of repetition but it was a memory they shared, a déjà vu and the joke wasn’t the joke. Or
more rightly the smile wasn’t owed to the joke but to the memory everything was
owed. To the memory that peace of a smile was owed, so why wasn’t he smiling.
Why was he smirking as he said it? Why did he not even act like that deserved
happiness.

“Could be its long lost daughter, she has bumps and men,
well bastards at least, don’t cry as she’s preparing to.” A rejoinder she
should have thought of a long, long time ago but that wasn’t her back then. Her
back then would have flinched at the word bastard but people change.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

This may be my favourite part of the town, the pier. Kristiansand is a beach town making it warmer than Oslo also meaning that the people have boats and places from which the boats take off. The wind here is fierce, it whips the snow into a frenzy, tiny bullets flying all over the place like an annoying corporate memo. The water that you look into is called the Skagerrak, its cold out there. Wind is cold, its annoying, its irritating and its oh so strong. When you walk along this pier you're usually wearing these heavy jackets that the wind pushes back. Walking slow motion has never been so easy. And it howls, making a mournful, soulful sound as it hurls snows at you. Maybe this is why the water looks like it has no soul, a sound that strong cannot be just elemental, it has to be spiritual too, a sound that mournful has to be meaningful.

And across this narrow sea is Denmark.

There’s a hierarchy in European
countries I was told on my first week here, a hierarchy that is not disputed
and has nothing to do with power, politics or economy. Depending instead on borderless
travel, cost of living and absurdity. When people in Norway want to buy cheap
they go to Denmark, people in Denmark go to Germany, people in Germany to
Poland and it goes on each country passing the ball to another until there is
nowhere to go but up.

The cost of living in
Norway is huge. The formalities of going anywhere else within the Schengen bloc
of countries is nil, the absurdity I will explain henceforth. Let me take the
example of a bottle of liquor, a full blooded bottle; those that run to 1 litre
or at least 750 ml. fondly referred to as mzinga back home. This in Norway
costs 350 nok. One euro makes 7.5 nok. In Denmark it costs about 150 nok. And
here lies the absurdity. The ship ticket to Denmark, the round trip-6-hour-in-total-ticket costs 50 nok. Let that sink in as I tell you that a pack of
cigarettes costs 90 nok here and 30 nok in Denmark. Let it begin to be clear to
you that you save money if you go to Denmark buy one pack of cigarettes let
alone a bottle of liquor and come back. One pack of cigarettes.

So bright and early on
Saturday morning we went on the boat. A service provided by colorline running
between my town of Kristiansand and the Danish town of Hirtshals. It was the
biggest boat I have ever been on. I can now without having to qualify this
statement with a quick no homo confirm that it is not the motion of the ocean
that matters but the size of the boat. 7 stories tall, a business class and an
even more prestigious voyager class, a hold in which buses, yes buses were
parked.

that's the ship.

I wasn’t there to see
the boat pull up anchor but I went on the deck soon afterward. The ship moves
fast and I am knot kidding. It cuts through the sea like a ship through a sea;
I have no idea of any other simile that better captures this. Behind the ship
in the wake of its motors is a churning of the sea water it looks like someone
took detergent in their hands and mixed it in with the sea, the water looks
solid but not in any complete way, a broken glass, or a mirror with a huge,
huge gash. A gash so huge in a mirror so big that you can convince yourself
what you are looking into is not a fault of this world but a window into
another. Added to this is the feeling of seeing an actual horizon. Not that
thing we have in cities and on lands which is broken every step of the way by
the shadow of a tree or the barging in of a building but actual horizon. Clear
and endless, disappearing into mist and mystery in the palace where the last
clouds meet the end of the world. A world that at that moment looks flat as a plate,
a world where you are careful as you rush because if you go to fast you could
fall off.

like di caprio am on a boat!

It was a gentle
passage, so slow you could almost forget you were on a ship and as the size of the
ship overwhelms you don’t think you are anymore, my friend took a nap woke up
and came to me,

“I think something is
wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t walk straight
I feel so dizzy like am drunk”

“You think that could
be because of the rocking of the ship?”

Those three hours flew
by pretty fast and soon we were in the Danish town of Hirtshals.

Denmark looks different
from Norway, for one thing they have this wheat grass is I guess what you would
call it. Grass that looks blow dried, sun bleached hair hanging out in the sun,
lounging back in the breeze of the wind. There was no snow on that day and the
sun was shining which is a very important plot point come later. Another
difference is the attitude towards alcohol. Norway is scared of alcohol, it is
traumatised deeply by some past experience and it has this deep, deep need to
keep the devils liquid out of its resident’s lips. You can only find any
alcohol stronger than 6% beer in a government controlled shop called
vinmonopulet which translates directly to wine monopoly. In Denmark you
walk into the convenience store and the first thing you see is the liquors for
sale. Granted this may only be in this Norwegian supermarket of a town, which
needs some explaining…

…I don’t want to throw
dirt on this town, I may miss. It’s that small. No one lives here, nobody. I
got the impression that it exists as some kind of supermarket for Norwegians.
Wikipedia informs me now that “The
shops in Hirtshals thrive on the excessive number of especially its Norwegian
visitors, who shop regularly in the small town all year long.” The
reasons for this are as I have stated earlier. so they immediately display what the Norse peeps want.

We walked down the streets and
we were alone. It was a pervasive aloneness a silence that wasn’t bothered by
our intrusion.It wasn’t the tense
silence of the library where you can just tell that people are ready to break
out in song and dance and that only their willpower is holding them in check or
more accurately their disapproval is holding in check those who would make
noise. Here you are invited to make noise and it’s not the solemn quiet of
nature, the kind of places where you speak just so that your echo is let loose
but different. Speak as loud as you can, there is no one around, shout as loud
as you can, no echo will return. It feels empty, the streets are, the stores
are and there is almost nothing to do except…

Drink!

actual pictures

My friends stopped for
lunch I did not want to be financially irresponsible, so instead of lunch I bought
beers with the same amount of money they used. And these were not 4.5% norge
beers these were 9% Danish beers. Packing a punch in a small bottle asking to
be throttled and swallowed and this I did. In the afternoon we walked toward s
the pier just to sit by the sea.

A boat was playing some
music and the sun was shining down on us.it was warm somewhere between 5 and 10
degrees and as I sat there I understood why people sun bask. The light caress
of the rays on my face was something. theres a sight i had missed seeing more than i knew. Its that thing that comes when you close your eyes to the sun and the light peeks through your lids leaving a red stain. Its a sight as much as a feeling, its something that stretches back before humans, this warmth of the sun that yawns back to the beginning and you can't shut your eyes to such history otherwise all you'll have is a red stai...and then I just fell asleep in my winter
clothes, with my Danish beer and all my cares left behind.

We woke up with hours
and hours to kill, I eventually bought some liquor, something I have sorely
missed. Stashed it in my bag and bought a few more beers to make the ride back
by ship that much better.

We drank on the way to
the ship, we drank as we waited in line variously getting into conversations
about the problems that will arise when your family gets used to life in Europe
and you want to return home (with a Jamaican who had the one of the closest parental relationships i have seen in a while.) talks about native American art and the reasons Americans don’t travel
as much (cost is as important to this as ego.) and of course punctuated every conversation with
sips of beer.

They don’t allow you to
get on the boat with your beer. The reason it’s so cheap to go is that they can
sell you alcohol, both at their bar and at the tax-free. So a ship captain
confiscated my beer. He took it away when I had just opened it. No time to
swallow, or protest, no open opportunity to chug it away and hide it in my gut,
just summary execution.

So for the last Danish
beer a friend and I went outside and stood in the cold. Stealing sips like
schoolboys. Security came and my friend quickly said,

“Yer we were drinking a
beer but we finished it.”

They believed, they
left, we drank, and got careless got caught again.

“You know you can’t
drink beer here right?”

“Where’s the dustbin
then?” I said chugging it all away as I took the can to the bin.